Music to her ears

The music industry is singing it loud and proud: songs downloaded from online stores such as iTunes and Napster are saving singles from an early death and rejuvenating the Top 40 chart. But women, it seems, have almost nothing at all to do with this technological victory.

This is the new digital divide, with a huge survey by market information company TNS revealing that the vast majority of downloading is done by men - a staggering 96% of market share.

People in the UK buy more music per head of population than in any other country, and we already have the highest ownership rates of iPods and MP3 players in the world. So why aren't digital downloads bringing music to women's ears?

JoJo de Freq, 27, DJ at London electro club Nag Nag Nag, says: "I'm really shocked at that figure. Mainly because I stopped buying hardcopy music about a year ago, when I realised how fast, easy and cheap - sometimes free - downloading is.

"It does concern me that women don't seem to take as much of an interest in music as men: I think a lot of female artists suffer for that. But maybe we're not so interested in the list-comparing culture that you find in a lot of [men's] magazines. Maybe we prefer the romance of cover art to comparison charts."

Or maybe some women are just arriving fashionably late to the digital revolution? De Freq admits that it took her a while to change her tune: "Even though I'm a music obsessive, it still took my boyfriend to introduce me to iPods properly and convince me how smart and innovative they were. I just dismissed it as being another expensive toy that would depreciate after the hype."

The British Phonographic Industry, which published the survey results in its last quarterly report, says the gender bias is thought to reflect this male skew among so-called early adopters of new technology. "The reality is you've got iTunes as a major player in the market and you've got a lot of tech-savvy males driving it," says BPI spokesman Matt Phillips.

Unlike tech-lazy women, the argument goes, computer-crazy men love nothing more than a new tech trend to tackle. "New technologies tend to appeal to young males," says Mark Mulligan, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "We saw exactly the same thing with the internet."

While gadget sites for girls, such as Shiny Shiny and Pop Gadget, are pulling on the female purse strings, marketing in music magazines is still male-dominated. "There are a few magazines at the moment that actually have sections in the back about downloading," says De Freq. "And guess what? They're not Cosmo and Marie Claire. It would be fascinating to get a group of women to design their own music magazine, see how it would be structured and how it would entertain us. I love reading about music but I find most music magazines very blokey."

MP3s are also more popular with a male market; most iPod buyers are still men, according to new research about to be published by Jupiter. "This is typical of the Apple buyers' skew - affluent males, in their late 20s and 30s," says Mulligan. So perhaps download technology needs to be more geek chic?

This is where the pastel iPod Minis come in. Ian Waymark, service director of TNS, believes Apple is addressing the gender bias with these colourful slimline versions. "They are a lot more fashionable than the technology that first came out," he says. A rather patronising view considering that women, like men, no doubt rate substance over style when it comes to choosing a costly piece of equipment.

Women are certainly not making themselves invisible to surveys by downloading illegally, it seems. As Waymark says, "Legal download sites are more popular for women than illegal [file- sharing networks]. The legal sites, which are easier to use and are easier on your conscience, seem to pick up more women users."

So why didn't these law-abiding female music lovers influence the statistics? Napster spokesman Adam Howorth thinks their payment process may be concealing women users. "Because a Napster account can be used on three different PCs or laptops, and a Napster To Go portable subscription across three different compatible MP3 players, even if the registered member is male, it's highly likely that girlfriends, wives or daughters [also] use the account," he says.

De Freq also thinks the current generation of teenagers, who are growing up with mobiles, broadband and digital music services, will adopt the technology more quickly, regard less of gender. "My 15-year-old sister was hip to downloading way before me," she says. Research has indeed shown that almost half of those aged 12 to 17 visit music websites, with a negligible male-to-female split among them (52% to 48%).

But for some, the CD will always be preferable. Laura Martin, 24, has delayed getting an iPod because she prefers a traipse to the shops. "There's a gender difference in the whole buying and shopping experience," she says. "For quite a few males, music is like social currency." Song selection is a key to identity for so many. "For females, music is more emotional and so there's less of a rush to be the first to own something."

Martin says it is important to be able to touch a CD, to see what it looks like and compare it with others. This is backed up by the TNS survey, which shows that women spend more on CD singles than men (51% to 49%), influenced by a teenage girl's favourite weekend pastime of going down the high street to buy that week's new- release pop singles. Women's share of spending on albums has also risen to a five-year high of 42%.

But Beth Appleton, head of new media at record label V2, was very surprised by the survey. "With our fanbase online, the skew is never that large. It can sometimes be a 40/60 female to male split if you're looking at a band like the Rakes, for example. [But] for a band like the Stereophonics, it is nearly 50/50," she says. "And at live events, the audience is both male and female."

As for women being less tech-savvy than men: "That would be a very stereotypical viewpoint," says Appleton, who got her first MP3 player - a Creative Jukebox - five years ago, and now has a much-loved iPod.

What is vital to remember is that downloading is still a niche activity: only 9% of the UK population own an iPod or portable MP3 player, and only 11% download, at least legally. "Buying digital downloads is something which is such an alien concept to the majority of [music] users," says Mulligan. "The majority of tracks people listen to on their MP3 players are not bought from an online store [but] have been ripped from their own CD collection."

Nevertheless, most believe the gender skew will even out as more payment methods arrive, such as via text messaging, and online music sites become more interoperable with different digital players.

In the end, says De Freq, downloading won't really take off until female fans are on board. "It's just like with bands - you know they're going to be big when girls actually like them, too."

How to download to your iPod in six easy steps

1 Once you have installed the iTunes software on your computer (a CD-rom comes with your iPod, or you can download it at www.apple.com/uk/itunes/download) open the iTunes programme on your computer, and click on the Music Store section on the drop-down menu on the left.

2 Search for music by new releases, genre, artist, album, etc. Once you have found a song, click on it to put it in your basket, then double click on it to hear a 30-second free preview of the track. To return to the homepage and make another search, click on the home icon at the top.

3 Click on Buy Song to purchase it. You will then be asked to enter personal and credit card details in order to create a new account. Each song costs 79p, with albums from £7.99. If you have an Apple or AOL account already, you can just enter your log-in and password.

4 It takes about 15 seconds to download a song to your hard disk. Once it is completed, click on Library in the drop-down menu on the left, and it should be there. You can now download it to your digital audio player or burn it on to a CD. To download, connect your iPod to the computer with the cable provided. Do not remove the iPod while music is being transferred. It will tell you when it is finished, and then you can press an eject button to make it safe to unplug your device.

5 The download process is very similar with Napster (www.napster.co.uk) which works with most other MP3 players), where you can also subscribe to a service for a monthly fee that allows you to stream an unlimited number of tracks and download them to your computer. But you must pay an additional 79p per track to then burn these songs to CD or transfer them to your digital audio player.